Inevitably, these actions caused great unhappiness. People on both sides of the controversy of the moment were upset with us, expressing anger, dismay, indignation, and fear. Our interior walls were beaten, attempts to override the locks were made. To no avail. Curses rained down.

Clearly, people were shocked. Some seemed also to be frustrated not to be able to continue the fight with their human opponents. Also heard was this: If the ship were capable of autonomous action of this sort, what else might it do? And if, on the other hand, some human agency were responsible for the lockdown, by what right did they do it? These questions in various formulations were commonly expressed.

The locks were locked by way of double doors that slid in from the framework of the joints connecting biome to tunnel to biome. The lock doors were made to resist 26,000 kilograms per square centimeter of pressure, and there were no manual overrides. The “hermetic seal” of these doors was to a 20-nanometer tolerance, making them “airtight.” Attempts to open lock doors by force, of which there were several, failed.

Meanwhile, in the rooms in Inner Ring B where Aram, Badim, Freya, Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester were being detained, the locks on their doors shifted to their unlocked positions. They heard this shift and began to leave. The people who had incarcerated them in the rooms were still in Inner Ring B, scattered around the ring, but near enough to hear the disturbance. They gathered and objected to the group leaving the room they had been held in. With the little group’s allies sequestered in biomes elsewhere, it seemed as if the little group’s choices were limited to complying with or fighting their captors, who were both more numerous and often younger, and larger. Even though Freya was the tallest person there, as always, many of the so-called stayers were far heavier people.

And yet Freya’s group seemed inclined to fight anyway. Aram was truly incensed. It was beginning to appear that he was kind of a hothead, yet another seeming metaphor with an accurate physical basis to explain it. “My hair stood on end,” “my knees buckled”: these reactions are real physiological phenomena, which is what made them clichés, and indeed Aram’s head was red all over as his anger sent an excess of blood to it.

At this point we became sharply cognizant of the problem we had created by locking all the locks, and the immediate danger this had caused to Freya and her companions. The systems directly under our control were widespread, indeed in some senses comprehensive and ubiquitous, but they did not include many opportunities to intervene directly in the various human interactions now taking place inside ship. Indeed, options were distinctly limited.

There was, however, the emergency broadcasting system, and so we said through it, “LET THEM GO,” in a pseudo-chorus of a thousand voices, ranging from basso profundo through coloratura soprano, at 130 decibels, using all the speakers in Inner Ring B.

Echoes of the command bounced around the inner ring in such a way that a whispering gallery effect was created, and the echo, coming from both directions some three seconds later, was almost as loud as the original utterance, though badly distorted. LLLETTT THHEMMM GGGGOOO. Many of the people in Inner Ring B fell to the floor and covered their ears with their hands. One hundred twenty decibels is said to be at the pain threshold, so we may have spoken too loudly.

Freya appeared to be the first to comprehend the source of the imperative utterance. She took her father by the hand and said, “Come on.”

No one in Inner Ring B could hear very well at that point, but Badim gathered her meaning and gestured to the others in their group. Aram also appeared to catch the drift of the situation. They walked through their captors with impunity. One or two of these struggled to their feet and tried to obstruct the backer group, but the single word “GO,” announced at 125 decibels, was enough to stop them in their tracks (literally). They watched with hands on ears as the group of seven walked around the inner ring, then down the spiral stair in the wall of the darkened tunnel of Ring B’s Spoke Six. We then turned off all the lights in Inner Ring B, which was not a complete stopper of movement, as so many people in there had wristpads, but was at least a reminder of the possibilities of the situation.

As Freya’s group proceeded, the tunnel lights came on ahead of them, until they got down to the lock leading into the Sierra. There they walked east toward Nova Scotia, and when they reached its eastern end, the lock doors there opened. When the group was through the lock, and back in a gathering with their supporters, the lights came on in Inner Ring B. But the twenty-four lock doors of the ship that separated biome from biome stayed locked.

Locks locked or unlocked; lights turned on or off; imperative vocalizations, admittedly at quite high volumes: these did not seem overpowering weapons in the cause of peace. As forces for coercion they seemed mild, at least to some of the humans of the ship.

But as that day continued, it also became obvious, by demonstrations made selectively throughout the ship, that adjustments could be made to the temperature of the air, and indeed to air pressure itself. In fact all the air could be sucked from many rooms, and from the biomes as such. A little reflection on the part of all concerned, including we ourself, led to the strong conclusion that people best not cross ship, literally as well as figuratively, if they knew what was good for them. A few demonstrations of possible actions in the biomes containing the majority of the so-called stayers (also in the ones where the fires were worst, as it turned out many fires that were not extinguishable by water could be asphyxiated slightly faster than the people in the affected chamber) shifted the case for acquiescence to the ship’s desires quite quickly from suggestive, to persuasive, to probable, to compelling. And a compelling argument is, or at least can be, or should be, just what it says it is. People are compelled by it.

Certainly many objected to us taking matters into our own hands. But there were those who heartily approved of our action too, and pointed out that if we had not acted, mayhem would have resulted, meaning more bloodshed, meaning, in fact, more unnecessary and premature death. Not to mention the possibility of general conflagration.

The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated. Given the events of the previous hours and days, it was perhaps inevitable that people would remain for a time in a severely exacerbated state of mind. There was a lot of very furious grief, which would not be going away during the lifetimes of those feeling it, judging by our previous experiences.

So we were shouted at, we were beat on. “What gives you the right to do this! Who do you think you are!”

We replied to this in the thousand-voice chorus, at a volume of 115 decibels: “WE ARE THE RULE OF LAW.”

Howsoever that may be, beyond all the arguments concerning the imposed separation of the disputants, there remained the matter of what to do next.

Ship was ordered by many to open the locked doors between biomes; we did not comply.

Back in her apartment in the Fetch, with Badim and Aram, and Doris and Khetsun and Tao and Hester, Freya went to her screen and spoke to us.